In casino halls, an amusement machine (e.g., a slot machine) has been recently equipped with an apparatus for taking thereinto banknotes or bar-code tickets. When a banknote is taken thereinto, an accounting operation is performed by a banknote processing device. Meanwhile, when a bar-code ticket is taken thereinto, an accounting operation is performed by a bar-code ticket processing apparatus. Specifically, in the accounting operation of a bar-code ticket, it is sometimes required to manage, for a predetermined period of time, the bar-code ticket itself used by a player or the like or image information thereof.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,201,320 discloses a bar-code ticket processing apparatus that reads image information of a bar-code ticket and identification information thereof (e.g., characters (validation number) indicating the contents of the bar-code), and transmits the image information and the identification information to an external device (terminal device) for managing the image information and the identification information.
However, the bar-code ticket processing apparatus disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,201,320 transmits all the image information of the bar-code tickets taken therein to the external device, regardless of consequence (success or fail) of reading of the identification information. Thus, the external device stores both the image information of bar-code tickets whose identification information were successfully read, and the image information of other bar-code tickets whose identification information were erroneously read (hereinafter referred to as “error bar-code ticket”). Thus, after the operation of the bar-code ticket processing apparatus has been finished, it is necessary to manually input the identification information of the error bar-code ticket, by using the external device, i.e., a burden of the operation by using the external device is increased. Especially, when the image information and the identification information are transmitted from a plurality of bar-code ticket processing apparatuses, the burden of the operation by using the external device is significantly increased.
On the other hand, there has been conventionally known another type of bar-code ticket processing apparatus that transmits the image information and the identification information to the external device, only when the identification information was successfully read.
However, since this type of bar-code ticket processing apparatus is disadvantageous in that, when the identification information fails to be read, the read image information is also not transmitted, so that neither image information nor identification information of such an error bar-code ticket cannot be transmitted to the external device.